Ground Control

I'm using the PCLinuxOS Minime distro, that way I can add just what I need, the disk is in an external drive, no other drives attached and I've told the machine to boot from an external drive.

 Once the machine starts booting you should see this screen initially, just press return on the top option.

After some time and much whirring of the CD , you should finally get to see this screen.

It defaults to te UK, but select the country you want to use and click on Next at the bottom.

Again much whirring.

And eventually you will arrive at the KDE4 desktop.

At the moment the desktop is set to accept single clicks, I prefer doub le clicks so once the install is complete we can change that setting. In the meantine click on the icon marked Install PCLinuxOS.

Then enter the administrator password which at the moment is root as shown at the top of the screen.

It's not hard to guess what to do at this screen.

So many people have so many different opinions about how to partition a drive, but in this case I'm just going to devote the whole of the partiton to the operating system and not use a seperate /home partition.

This means selecting the Custom Disk Partitioning option and then clicking on next.

There is an exisitng partition on this drive so I need to remove it first, easiest thing to do is click on the Clear All option which removes everything.

Then click on the area underneath the hard drive device, in this case SDA and then on the create button.

You can now resize your partition and once more I'm not bothered with working out the optimal size for a swap partition, just move the slider all the way over to the right and then back a little bit,

Put a / in the bottom box to show how the drive will be mounted, then click on OK

And thenclick on the bit that's left on the top right of the drive and click on create.

Then select Linux swap and move the slider all the way to the right and then click on OK

Now click on Done and iit's at this point that the installation may require a reboot and you have to go through this process one more time. In this case it's just gone straight on.

You will get a warning that the drive is going to be formatted, I'm happy about that so I'm going to click on OK.

And the install routine now goes off all by itself, I'll let you go through the various screens you will see until we get to the next stage.

After a while you should then get to this screen, just go for Next.

Then Finish.

And then finally Finish again.

You can either power the machine down now or click on the PC button and then Leave. Powering the machine off will cause no problems as the file system that's been in operation is on the CD and can't be corrupted.

And that's the install completed.